Friday, February 01, 2019
Ticket Reseller War Stories
Butts In the Seats: About three years ago I wrote about the problem of ticket resellers creating website names that approximate that of performance venues or using names that imply they are the central ticketing source for your city. At the time, my venue saw people who had bought tickets at a big mark up or for events that weren’t actually happening once a year or so. Now that I have moved to new position in a new city, I see it happening ALL THE TIME.
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I have had this misfortune of seeing these companies a lot in Atlanta in particular when I am getting tickets for specific events. There seems to be about four our five different companies representing a venue and for some of them they turn out to be light third party companies but I have had on two occasions at different venues experienced this cat fishing where I was sold tickets that did not exist. That being said I have also had series trouble with known companies in particular stub hub. Most recently stub hub I have found have been cat-fished themselves by companies or individuals selling bad tickets. This happened to me over break when I went to the MLS Cup final and I was given fake tickets by a reseller by bad outside party. We didn’t find this out however until we got to the stadium and my father wasn’t able to get in. And what was most surprising is venues and companies like stub hub have very little procedure for how to deal with these things. The stadium had a one trust policy where they only could verify or approve Ticketmaster tickets directly so my dad had this misfortune of missing the game.
I always try to buy directly from the box office or the show or venue website directly. Being from New York City there are so many shows with so many fakes that I just don’t trust anything that is not directly from the source. I wisht there was more that could be done than warn people or even a more effective way to do that. As this article said, putting out a newsletter or any warning really only reaches those who came to the source in the first place and never reaches those who are probably the ones to accidentally buy the tickets that never existed. It just sucks that it’s so easy for people to get screwed over because for some this was their one chance. They put their money into this show or this was the one trip they had to go to this event and now they are out of money and crushed in spirit. It can be incredibly discouraging to the fake ticekt holder and detrimental to the arts community to lose potential audience because they were cheated by someone else.
These are really great tips, but also are people really that idiotic. I do not think I have ever known anyone such a schmuck to fall for these kind of things. But for those who do fall into this lunacy it is great that there is some attempt and basic information to avoid someone trying to scam you. My dad has season tickets to a few sports games and he obviously resells the ones he cannot attend and charges a fair price and does it all honestly, these horrible websites ruin that for everyone. However I respect the genius of being able to pull of the scam of selling seats that do not exist anymore. I do not obviously approve of such illegal cons, but I much envy the creativity it takes to pull it off. Also if you really want to stop this kind of scam make everyone in the world take Computing at Carnegie so they know how to recognize phony names.
The fact that certain people try to profit with fraud-ish ticket selling has a long history, at least the cases I've heard. I do agree that some kind of free trading mechanism between the theater goers should be established, but the bottom line is that the ticket can never be profitable. Currently, there is not really a good answer to this loop hole in the industry. Some of the companies tried to ID customers on purchasing, which works well, but only on smaller scale like regional theater. The national events like concerts or grand openings are still suffer from ticket reseller issues. In worst cases, people will have reseller as the only option if they want to see the show, and paying much more than they should. In my opinion, this is just fraud deeds.
I don’t feel as strongly against ticket scalping as many people do, but what this article is describing is clearly unethical. If you are going to resell tickets, you should at least be upfront about the fact you aren’t the original seller. Intentionally making your name be confused with theirs is absolutely unacceptable. Similarly, selling tickets that do not exist is just blatantly a scam. I’m also surprised that this is just a big issue for a regional theater. Even though there are many very large and very popular regional theater, I think of ticket scalping and reselling as mostly an issue for sports events, concerts, and commercial theater, not local operas. Unfortunately, it seems like there is only so much theaters can do to prevent this. Shutting down sellers sounds like basically a game of whack a mole. Ideally this information would be known to people wanting to buy tickets, but as mentioned in the article, it is hard to reach first time buyers with this knowledge. Definitely a tough problem to solve.
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